Monday, November 12, 2012

Started my options trading

Dear fellow traders,

Recently I have started paper-trading options again. I want to brush up my skills and build up my confidence before I trade with real money. I wish to express my Thanks to Trader Travis from http://www.learn-stock-options-trading.com/ for sharing his precious knowledge with me.

Although I have to admit my trading methodology and trading style are not following exactly what Trader Travis has taught, the tools and the trading psychology that he has shared have helped me immensely in my decision making in these trades.





I truly hope the profits I have obtained from my paper trading can transpire into my live trading soon.

Yours Truly,

Tony Chai

Saturday, September 29, 2012

The Next Financial Crisis

Dear Fellow Traders,

This is a great documentary that foretell the next financial crisis after the sub-prime mortgage real estate crisis in 2008.



Yours Truly,

Tony Chai

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Greek Election Impact On The Market

Hi fellow traders,



Investors waited with bated breath about the outcome of Greek Election this Sunday on the global market reaction on Monday.


The US CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) has gone up during the past few weeks. Markets were volatile amidst events like : the dismal US non-farm payroll report for May 2012, Spain's banks bailout, speculation of whether Greek's voters will choose the leftist Syriza party who opposes the austerity measures, and how Greek's possible exit from Euro-Zone will affect other members of the European community, the USA economy and of course, how the global markets is going to be affected.


Yours Truly,

Tony Chai

Saturday, June 02, 2012

Gold Rose More Than USD60 on 1 June 2012

Dear fellow traders,

Gold has been hovering below the 150 Days Moving Average (DMA) since the beginning of March 2012, a stark difference with the bullish movement that Gold enjoyed back in 2009 to 2011, when Gold even hit USD1900 an ounce in Sep 2011.




But surprisingly (or it has been waiting for this moment), Gold price shot up more than USD60 on 1 June 2012 to end at USD1621.80 an ounce.


This could be largely due to the dismal May US jobs report, where U.S. Economy created only 69,000 jobs in May 2012, the fewest in a year; and the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.2%. There are also other factors involved - Europe's spiraling debt crisis where Spain's bank crisis deepened and confidence waiver with the spike in Italian benchmark bond yields.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average had its worst hit this year on Friday, 1 June 2012, shredding 274.88 points (2.2%) to 12,118.57 points. The DOW has officially dropped below the institutions observed 200 Days Moving Average with this move.





Yours Truly,

Tony Chai

Monday, March 26, 2012

The S&P 500 at 4-Year High

Dear fellow traders,


At the end of the trading day 26 Apr 2012, The Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S & P 500) gained 19.40 points, or 1.39%, to 1,416.51 (19 March 2008 High was 1,414).

The Dow Jones industrial Average (DOW) was up 160.90 points, or 1.23%, to reach 13,241.63. The tech laden Nasdaq Composite Index (NDX) climbed 54.65 points, or 1.78% , to 3,122.57.

Mr Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve (the Central Bank of USA), spoke to a conference at the National Association for Business Economics, that the FED will consider further, supportive monetary policy aka QE3 (quantitative easing) to faciliate the expansion of production and demand from consumers and businesses.



In his talk, Mr Bernanke said the USA economy needed to grow more quickly if it is to produce enough jobs to lower the high unemployment rate of 8.3%.

The S & P 500 has been up 25% since the end of September last year, mostly on the optimism of the continued economic growth. With stimulus from the Fed and an improving economy, the conditions for the stock market to go up further is hopeful.

Yours truly,

Tony Chai

Monday, February 20, 2012

ETP System Auto Trading Program - A Review

Dear fellow traders,

Auto trading has gained popularity during these recent years among traders. In fact, many big financial institutions have been using system programs to trade accounts in the sum of millions or even billions of dollars in trading mutual funds and also in hedge funds.

According to Wikipedia, a special class of algorithmic trading is the "high-frequency trading" (HFT), in which computers make elaborate decisions to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe. As of year 2009, HFT firms account for 73% of all US equity trading volume.

Retail traders who commit the majority of their time in their day jobs or with their family, hardly have the privilege to sit down in front of the PC to trade. Thus, at times they missed out some good trades when they do not have the opportunity to enter their trades. It could also spell trouble for traders who are not used to setting stop losses in their trades, to see their trading capital vapourized when they are unavailable to close out their losing trades. With the fear of mounting losses in their trades, this also drastically effect their concentration in whatever they are doing (eg. in their job) that have prevented them in closing their trades.

That’s where the advantage of auto trading comes in. An auto trading system enables you to simply install a trading system in your trading account and you just let the system trade your account on its own. You code in the entry criteria for the system to enter the trades. At the same time, you can also program the exit rules to either stop loss a losing position, lock in your targeted profit or to let your profit run.

This type of auto trading, or system trading, helps to free up your time to monitor your trades; especially if you are trading an instrument that is traded almost 24 hours a days, 5 days a week, for instance, forex trading. At the same time, you will not likely to miss out some of the good trades during times when you are not available in front of the trading screen, like when you’re at work or when you’re asleep. With automatic trading, the trades will be triggered automatically by the auto trading program when the entry criterias that you have coded are met.  

For instance, the auto trading workshop that I have recently attended even allow us to adjust the entry criteria of my trading codes to adapt to the ever changing market conditions. This is because the trading program provided by the ETP Trading System is white box. This means that the trading rules are all transparent to the attendees. We have the ability to change the trading criterias that we see fit according to the current market conditions.

I wonder whether you are aware that most of the forex auto trading robot that are sold in the internet are black box. These system may have work well in the past. However, after you’ve bought the black box system and realized that when they stop working in the current market conditions, you are helpless and only see yourself keep losing your precious trading capital. You are practically under the mercy of the programmer who sold you the black box trading robot of whether he would ever provide an upgrade to the trading program. Since it is black box, you can’t make any adjustment to the codes. And even if you want to, you probably won’t understand how the codes work. At least with the ETP automatic trading set file, we understand exactly what our entry criterias are and at what point we cut our loss or take profit. The ETP auto trading system is white box. You are able to amend these criterias as and when necessary.

The other thing I like about the auto trading program taught by ETP System is that it even  allow traders to input the money management and risks management criterias. As most seasoned traders know, money management is an important discipline that has to be adopted right at the beginning if you aspire to be a professional trader in the long run. Money management basically means that you allocate an appropriate percentage of your trading capital for every trade, irregardless whether you are winning money or when you have encountered a series of losing trades. Disciplined money management will prevent you from blowing up your account trading bigger lot sizes to recover your earlier losses. As we all know, you could very well lose everything in this last bet of yours. The money management criterias that are built into the ETP trading set file will safe-guard traders right at the start. You can enter a specified lot size for every trade to remove the temptation of over betting your trading account. As mentioned, you can input these criteria according to the risks/rewards tolerance that you are comfortable with.

Talking about trading emotions, auto trading program helps to eliminate the twin tower emotions of fear and greed that most traders face. The program executes the trade when the entry signals are satisfied. This eliminate the hesitance that some traders encounter, especially new traders, who are afraid to enter a trade when the signals appear. On the other hand, there are some traders who tend to over analyze a trade too much. The trade would then become risky if they enter too late after much pondering. There’s also the indecision that most traders face with a losing position. But with auto-trading, the program will just terminate the trade when the specified stop loss is hit. This is more sensible compared to getting yourself nervous hanging on to a losing trade,  hoping and praying that the trade will turn around; which may never happen.

The flip side of the emotions of fear is about greed. I believe many traders have moments when they want to hang on to their profitable trades as long as possible to squeeze more profits from the winning trade. But they become immobilized when their trade suddenly turned around. They stubbornly hang on to their trade only to see their trade turned into a losing trade instead, just because they want to gain back the profits they saw earlier. At least with the ETP auto trading set file, you can set the initial profit target that you wish to stick to. You can also set the minimum profit that you want to see before the system triggers a trailing stop loss and profit target. Thus, in the event when your trade turns sour, you will at least protect some of the profits accumulated with the trailing profit & stop loss setup. As mentioned, the ETP  trading codes is a white box system. You can amend these stop loss and profit criterias according to your trading risks appetite.

The other important component that the ETP auto trading program handle is Risks Management. You are able to program whether you want additional trades to be triggered to salvage a losing trade. This helps you to at least achieve break-even or even gain a small profit when your initial trade start to turn favourable. The risk management also take into considerations additional stop loss measures that you may want to implement to better protect your trading capital in case you are a more conservative trader. You live to trade another day as long as you have your capital at hand. As usual, you are able to adjust the risks management criterias in the ETP set file.

Thus, the ETP auto trading program takes care of 4 important pillars of a good trading system, namely : entry management, exit management, money management and risks management. Since the ETP auto trading program codes is a white box trading system, you will attend a 2 full-days weekend workshop where the specified criterias in all the 4 critical components of the auto trading program will be explained to you. In the workshop, you will also learn how to amend these criterias to suit your trading style and your risks/rewards appetite. There are many group activities in the workshop to keep the session lively. These activities also help you to absorb the materials better from practical application rather than just going through the workshop notes. After this 2 days workshop, you are also able to attend the ongoing basic and advanced workshops on specified weekday evenings to refresh what you have learned and to learn advanced skills in adapting the ETP auto-trading set file to your trading requirements.

The
ETP auto trading workshop is taught personally by Mr. Marcus Lau. Marcus is a former Director and shareholder of an MNC. He is a seasoned investor with more than 11 years of solid investing experience. Personally, I find Marcus to be a very knowledgeable and dedicated speaker. He has an in-depth knowledge of the ETP auto trading system. Most importantly, he is able to explain the intricate criterias of the 4 components of this trading program clearly and patiently. I also like the way he injects some humor and sometimes relevant anecdotes during the workshop to make the learning session more alive.

You may also be keen to know that the ETP auto trading system allows you the flexibility to trade a variety of trading instruments, including foreign currencies and commodities like gold, silver and even oil.

Give yourself an opportunity and check out whether the ETP auto trading program suits your trading requirements. You can check the latest preview dates here.

You can call +65 8188 7488 or
register online at : http://www.etpsystem.com/

Location :
10 Anson Road #19-14,
International Plaza,
Singapore 079903
(above Tanjong Pagar MRT) 

Good News!! If you decide to sign up for the 2 day workshop after seeing this review, the organizer has specially allow me to offer you the following discount code to you so that you can grab a S$250 discount off the workshop costs. But this discount code is not going to last forever. Thus, I would like to advise you to take advantage of this discount code to claim your S$250 discount while it is still available.

The discount code is : 08009J

Personally, I feel that its worth investing 2 hours of your time to attend the workshop preview to at least decide whether you want a trading system that can free up your quality time for your other commitments. At the same time, determine whether the ETP auto trading system can fulfill your trading objectives, your trading lifestyle and the risks/rewards tolerance level that you desire.

*** Latest *** - You can view the status of my live ETP Trading over Here..

Remember to inform the organizer about the discount code : 08009J so as to grab the S$250 discount during registration!

Good Luck with your trading!

Tony Chai

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Facebook IPO

Dear fellow traders,

Facebook, the most popular and biggest social network site on earth, with 850 million users world-wide, has filed papers to the SEC to go public for an IPO which can raise up to US$5 billion dollars. Facebook is valued to be worth at least US$100 billion as of today.

If this IPO creates excitement like its predecessors including Google, Yahoo!, Groupon, Lnkedln etc, Facebook will probably sell its shares at a premium. That could mean an IPO price in the $35 to $40 range.






Regards,

Tony Chai

Sunday, January 15, 2012

S & P downgraded 9 Euro-Zone Countries

Dear fellow investors,

Over 13 Jan 2012, Standard & Poor's, U.S.-based ratings agency, downgraded the credit ratings of 9 euro- zone countries. These 9 euro zone countries include Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, France, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia and Austria They were stripped of their AAA status either by 1 notch or 2. But Germany is spared from this credit ratings cut.

The agency cited the reasons that the European community had not adequately "address ongoing systemic stresses in the eurozone" - which encompass issues like the tightened credit conditions, rising risks premium, weakened economy growth etc.

The ratings agency mentioned that austerity and budget discipline adopted by the euro zone are insufficient to handle the debt crisis.

But French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said there was no cause for alarm and assured that "This is not a catastrophe. But it's not good news,"

In addition, the fate still hangs in the air for Greece, as Greek negotiators said that debt swap by private creditors remained unresolved. Negotiators were less optimistic and raised doubts over the take-up rate of any voluntary deal.

In Dec 2011, The European Central Bank infuse the banks with cheaper 3 year liquidity that helped ease a worsening credit crunch. This provided funds for the market to buy sovereign bonds.

Chairman of the S & P ratings agency said that preserving the AAA status of France would require the increased commitments from the 4 remaining AAA-rated guarantors, namely Germany, Finland and the Netherlands. But this move could be politically unpopular.



The following video explains the meaning of "Austerity Measures" :


Regards,

Tony Chai